Versatile Ladies: the bisexual option (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  Then, when I first got into a decent relationship with a man, I threw the whole gay scene over completely. Again, more of this you-are-or-you-aren’t way of thinking. Here I had discovered I could make it with a man and really enjoy it, and this seemed to mean that I was normal and heterosexual and all of that, and so I had to give up what I had done before. The way I did this was by telling myself it was a stage I had gone through. I had read all about how so many boys and girls would get involved in a homosexual scene during adolescence and outgrow it, and I decided that was what my relationship with Eileen had been, a stage I had gone through, a part of developing that I could forget about now because it was over and done with and no longer a real part of my ongoing life.

  Swinging was something I resisted for a very long time. At least it seemed that way at the time. I don’t suppose it was really more than a few months from the time Ron brought up the idea to our first date with another couple, but it was so much on my mind during that time, and then I would push it out of my mind and he would bring it up again, and it seemed as though it was a process that was going on forever.

  Finally I went along with it . . .

  It worked out well for us from the first time. I guess this isn’t always the way it happens. I have heard so many stories from people who have had rotten initial experiences. So many girls have told me about being so enormously inhibited the first time that they were literally unable to have sex with the other man. Literally incapable of it, vaginal muscles tightening up, the whole thing. Or else they went through with it and couldn’t relax and enjoy it. Or the other couple was weird or old or ugly or in some other way managed to turn them off completely. Or they were self-conscious, any of a number of things that added up to their having a rotten time of it.

  No such problem for us. We swung with a really nice couple and it was all pleasant and relaxed and cool. The first couple we met were very much in the same position as we were. I think that probably helped. They had had a handful of swinging sessions but were not terribly experienced, they had only been into it for a couple of months. This made us feel a lot more at ease. Also, they were people we had a great deal in common with and we managed to relax and open up conversationally before we got around to the sex part, so it wasn’t like meeting a couple of total strangers and balling with them before you learned anything more about them than their names. This can be groovy, but it’s a bad idea for your first time.

  Through all of this, I must say that I didn’t consciously have any thoughts about making it with another girl. I suppose you could say that there was a homosexual element to the whole thing. I have read that argument so many times and I think I understand it, although I’m not sure it really means anything. The idea that you get excited by the idea of having your husband screw another woman, that it’s a way for you to make love to her by proxy. And vice-versa, that for your husband to share you with another man is a way for him to have that other man without being physically intimate with him. So in that sense there was a homosexual element involved, but it was nothing I was conscious of and if it really played a role or not in my enjoyment of swinging is something I’m not sure about.

  I would find certain of the women we swung with attractive, some more than others, but I didn’t think in terms of making love to them, just that they were attractive and that I was glad because it would make the evening more exciting for Ron. Now some of the time when I was with a man I would imagine what Ron and the other wife were doing. I would have this fantasy in my mind while I was with the other husband, either thinking about it or actually picturing them in my mind. You could argue that I was identifying with Ron and enjoying the woman in fantasy but I don’t know whether or not it was exactly like that. I think it was more just a general voyeur thing, the way you enjoy watching other people screw, except I was watching them in my mind, in my imagination, instead of literally sitting there watching.

  Almost from the beginning, we were both aware that there was a lot of female bisexualism in the swinging scene. Not as much as there is now. This was, let me think, it was almost five years ago. There was a lot of it in the ads and a lot more actually going on than you could tell from the ads, but it wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it is now.

  When we answered ads, we generally tended to avoid the ones that came right out and described one or both of the couple as versatile. It was easier to avoid those ads and not have to worry about any hangups arising. Besides, we were mostly looking for less experienced swingers, people like ourselves with whom we would have the most in common, rather than really seasoned swingers who were into all sorts of things that we weren’t really ready for yet.

  Looking back on it, it’s easy to see that there were a few couples who were interested in a bi scene long before we got into it. Some of the girls gave me looks or said things with a double meaning which I honestly didn’t get at the time, and then they let it pass. And I remember one couple we swung with, I balled her husband in the living room while Ron took her to bed, and as we were leaving she put her arms around me and gave me a kiss and said something like, ‘I can understand what you boys see in Leila, I could go for her myself’ or words to that effect. It was all said in a friendly joking manner but I’m sure she also meant it in a very literal way, and I guess I realized as much at the time but didn’t dwell on it.

  Then a couple of times it was brought up more directly. I remember a husband suggesting it once. We had all made love and were sitting around taking a breather and talking, and he went into this story about an act two wives had put on at a party, and I forget now how he put it, but it was to the effect that his wife and I ought to try it just to see how we liked it. She thought it over and said she supposed she was willing if I was, and I said I didn’t think so, that it wasn’t my scene, and we left it at that.

  When we got home that night Ron said he thought the other girl had been willing and was actually quite interested in it. I told him it seemed pretty obvious to me that she had done it before and didn’t want to come right out and say so, that the scene the guy had been talking about was one that his own wife had taken part in. The same way people will tell you a story about some unnamed friend of theirs and you know damned well it happened to them and not a friend at all.

  “Well,” he said, “if you ever want to try out something like that, go right ahead.”

  I said, “Wouldn’t it bother you?”

  He said, “Why should it bother me? If it doesn’t bother me to have you make love to another man, why should it bother me if you made love with a woman?”

  I almost told him then about Eileen, but I decided not to. It was something I had never mentioned to him. But one result of it was that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About Eileen, and also about the possibility of having sex with a woman. I remember one afternoon thinking about that particular girl, the one whose husband had made the suggestion, and I remembered that Ron had gone down on her, and all at once I got this tremendous flash of what it would be like to french her. To eat her. I got this total sensory image, as if I was imagining my mouth on her, the taste and smell of her and everything. It was overwhelming. I sat there in the middle of my living room and picked up my skirt and masturbated. I let the fantasy take hold of me and I touched myself and I had this positively overpowering orgasm in the middle of the afternoon and in the middle of the living room.

  Afterward I felt . . . I don’t know how to describe it. And then I would have thoughts that lesbianism, that the sort of schoolgirl sex I had had with Eileen, was a stage you outgrew, but so was masturbation supposed to be a stage you outgrew, and actually I had never entirely stopped masturbating, it’s still something I will do now and then when I happen to be in the mood for that sort of thing, and maybe that meant that you never outgrow anything.

  Then not long after that we were with a couple we had swung with before, we had swung with them actually several times in the past, and instead of hinting around it came right out in the open. The girl said right ou
t that she was bi, that she enjoyed making love to other women once in awhile, but only if it was someone she really liked and someone she was really attracted to. And she felt that way about me and would like to make love to me.

  I was a little rattled. I said that it wasn’t my scene, I wasn’t really interested. She asked if I had ever tried it and I said I hadn’t. Then she said I ought to try it once and find out if I liked it or not, that I should at least find out, and that I wouldn’t have to do anything, I could just lie there and let her go down on me. That it would give her a great deal of pleasure to do that and she wouldn’t expect me to do anything in return.

  Now this is funny, Jack. What went through my mind at the time was that I really wanted to go down on her, that I wanted that more than to just lie there while she did me. And I wanted it very very much. I was really quite hot from the conversation and I couldn’t look at her without wanting her, and the result was that I was becoming very uncomfortable about the whole thing. Because I had this hangup, I wanted to do it but I didn’t want anyone to know I wanted to do it, because I didn’t want to identify myself as a lesbian. I was so afraid of the label . . .

  When we got home again we talked about it, and Ron was actually trying to talk me into doing it. And he used the same argument she had used, that I ought to give it a try just to see how I liked it. And he went on to say that it wouldn’t bother him, that it wouldn’t make him think less of me, that he would find the whole thing very exciting.

  Finally I came out and told him that it wasn’t something I had never tried. I just told him that much, and he badgered me for details, and before I knew it I had gone on to tell him the whole story of my relationship with Eileen, what we had been to each other and everything. He kept asking questions, what we did, how I had felt about it, what it felt like for me, whether I was in love with her, everything.

  Evidently it had been terrible weight for me to carry about all that time, because telling him about it was a great cathartic experience for me emotionally. Once I really started talking I opened up completely, and I would find myself actually weeping and he would hold me and comfort me, and we would get into whole areas of my past that I had never been able to talk about, my feelings about my parents and various things in my childhood that I don’t really want to talk about now, but that it was very important for me to talk about at the time. It was an extraordinary experience for me, really opening myself up for him as I had never opened up in the past, and I think it did me a lot of good in a great many ways.

  One of the effects was that he became enormously excited. I guess there are dozens of reasons why it turns men on to imagine their wives with other women. Dozens of reasons why men find lesbians exciting. The reasons don’t really matter. What it comes down to is that this is something that really turns on maybe ninety-nine men out of a hundred, and Ron was not the exception to the rule. He made really wild love to me all night long.

  It was some evening. I would talk and talk and talk, and he would hold me while I sobbed and cried, and then we would fuck like maniacs, and then I would start talking again and we would go through the entire process again start to finish, and it kept repeating that way until daybreak.

  The upshot of it all was that I was able to face certain things about myself for the first time, and after that night it was inevitable that I would have sexual relations with another woman.

  But we didn’t want to hurry it. We decided not to bring it up but to let it just happen naturally of its own accord. I wouldn’t make any passes or anything, but as soon as a girl propositioned me in one way or another, and if she was a girl who appealed to me in that way, then I would let it happen and we would both be secure about it, knowing it wasn’t something that could make either of us think less of the other.

  So of course then we went through a long stretch of nothing at all happening. We swung once a week, week in and week out, and nothing happened as far as my making it with another girl was concerned. Nobody brought it up conversationally, none of the other girls made even the subtlest sort of overtures.

  You can’t imagine how frustrating this was! I was really uptight about it, because all at once this was the only thing I could think of. We had stopped talking about it after a little while. Ron and I, that is. Because that was part of letting it happen naturally, just not even talking about it among ourselves so that we wouldn’t be making a federal case out of it.

  Not thinking about it was something else.

  Finally we got in touch with Harry and Beverly. They were the couple that started the whole thing. Beverly was the girl who said she wanted to do me. To french me. I called them and invited them over to our house for an evening. Bev seemed slightly reticent on the phone, as if maybe they didn’t want to swing with us, and she said something about having to check to see if they were free that night, that she thought they might have to go out of town and she would have to wait until Harry came home and check it out with him.

  After I hung up I thought about it, about her attitude, and I thought maybe it was that she didn’t want to swing unless I wanted to have sex with her. But not so cut and dried, actually. More that there was a certain amount of tension that had built up that night, and if it was still there it would make a bad situation for all of us, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to get involved in something like that.

  So I called her right back, and I hemmed and hawed for a minute and then more or less blurted out that I had been thinking about what she had said and I wanted to try it. And I told her my reasons for calling back, and she admitted that she had been having thoughts along those lines, and we made the date and went through with it.

  It was such a strange scene. Because naturally I was enormously nervous about the whole thing. You can’t imagine how nervous I was. What I was most afraid of was that I wouldn’t like it. That I had it all built up in mind but that if I actually tried it I would discover it seemed unnatural to me. And I thought how terrible it would be if this happened. How unpleasant it would be for her, how unfair for her.

  Beverly must have realized right away how nervous I was. The four of us sat around having drinks and she asked me to help her in the kitchen. When we were alone together she told me not to worry, that I didn’t have to go through with it if I had changed my mind. I told her that wasn’t it at all, that I wanted to go through with it. She asked me if I would like to go upstairs, just the two of us. This was precisely what I wanted. I didn’t want anything to happen in front of Ron and Harry. Not the first time, at any rate. I just wanted to be alone with Bev. We went upstairs to the bedroom and she closed the door and locked it. Then she turned and looked at me and I looked at her and we . . . we fell into each other’s eyes. That’s the only way I can describe it.

  I thought how beautiful she was, those high cheekbones and eyes like a cat and that small but really voluptuous body. I had seen her with Ron and now we were standing there looking at each other with all our clothes on and I was remembering what she looked like naked and I was beginning to burn. When she kissed me I didn’t hold anything back. I opened my mouth and her tongue came inside and I let myself get completely lost in the kiss.

  “Oh, my,” she said. And she gave me this long quizzical look, and I blushed and nodded, and we got undressed and made love.

  It was, oh, more than I had hoped. Much more . . .

  And all that worrying. It was really silly. I had thought that learning to enjoy sex with men would make sex with women impossible for me, or that it would seem like nothing compared to the other, but if anything it works the other way around. When I was with Eileen I wasn’t a wholly sexual being. I had never really been fucked, I didn’t know what to do with my body, I wasn’t really into sex. But now, after my relationship with Ron and with all the swinging I had done, I was a fully sexual person, and as a result I was able to get completely into sex with Bev, and it was incredible.

  Afterward she told me she couldn’t believe it was my first time. That I was just too sensual
and too good at it for me never to have done it before. And I admitted that it wasn’t, but that it was the first time in, oh, too many years to count. And I told her about Eileen and everything.

  She was really interested, because she had never had any sexual relations with other women until she was into swinging, and it was the other way around for me. We talked about it for awhile before we went downstairs to rejoin the men, and I told her how afraid I had been that I wouldn’t like it. But I discovered that you just don’t lose your taste for it . . .

  • • •

  At thirty-three, Leila is a poised and attractive woman. Her blonde hair is fashionably styled, her makeup sparingly but artfully applied. She is tall and quite slender, small in the breasts and hips. Her legs are extremely well-shaped, and she favors mini skirts that display them advantageously. In conversation she tends to cross and recross her legs frequently in a manner that constitutes a threat to an interviewer’s professional detachment.

  She has been married for almost twelve years, and she and her husband Ron have been swinging for almost half of that time. She has come to regard herself as fully bisexual and seems able to accept that definition of herself with no discernible mixed feelings.

  Leila’s statement that “you don’t lose your taste” for lesbian relations is indisputable enough, if touched slightly with double entendre. In her case, however, her previous homosexual experiences almost certainly served to delay her entry into bisexual swinging. While her college affair with Eileen made her quick to realize that she could enjoy sex with another woman, it also engendered fears on the subject which kept her from accepting early advances.

  Leila herself is aware of this.

  • • •

  When I was with Eileen, I just wasn’t ready to let go and be myself. I was too immature and too insecure and that got in the way. One of the big problems was that I did not have any concept of bisexuality. I didn’t know such a thing really existed. Of course I had heard the expression AC-DC and knew what it meant but I couldn’t take it seriously. I thought a person who functioned that way, who had sex with both men and women, must be a lesbian at heart who was having sex with men to prove something, to prove that she was normal, I guess.